Remember when all was made in the USA?

I blame the business schools. They don't teach what Bill Holden preached to the executive board at the end of this movie these days. Now it's all RONA - Return on net assets. There's no pride either - just drones showing up for work everyday to put in their eight hours. Morale is at an all time low. It's sad.
KS

Your right. We need to lower wages even more, as long as the Chinese get richer.

"yes, it sucks that capital from our capital-rich, wealthy, decadent nation is flowing overseas to improve the lives of millions, maybe even billions, of dirt-poor chinese people. it really sucks that our money is doing a lot more good there than it can do here. billions of lives, improving, world-wide, thanks to U.S. consumption of goods manufactured overseas. that totally blows. who are those chinese, to have the gall to sell us products that feed and house their families. those monsters. "

Dear Lord, another business major. Or are you a confused pawn of the current anti-business administration? In case you haven't noticed, more and more of our manufacturing has gone off shore as taxes and wages have cut so far into profits that businesses can't even reinvest its own money into itself for improvements and other operating costs. What you see as decadence is what put this country on equal and then better than equal footing with the rest of the world. With an unemployment rate nearing 10% here, I think the money would do more good on our own shores rather than the rest of the world's. China sells us very few products that were actually developed there. It's mostly outsourced manufacturing from American companies - unfortunately.
KS

Amazing how someone can take a thread about nostalgic remembrance of a by-gone time and twist it into a hateful, spiteful rant against the US. And not an intelligent rant, but a blindly ignorant one.

Maybe you missed the fact that the Chinese were dirt poor for centuries because of the repressive, totalitarian dynasties that ruled there. Then they traded that for a genocidal maniac with his "Little Red Book" that exterminated over 50 million of his own people. Not sure how our "decadent" nation was responsible for that, or why we owe them our jobs, resources or intellectual property.

Now the dictators there wear Armani instead of black pajamas, but the soul crushing repression lives on. The Chinese routinely engage in corporate espionage, computer hacking, money counterfeiting, and out-right theft of patent and copyright property. They burn through workers like so much cord wood.

Our nation got wealthy and powerful because free people were given the opportunity to innovate, create, and produce more amazing things than any other nation on Earth. The Chinese are neither free nor innovative, and their leadership looks upon them as sheep to be shorn. Take a good look at the suicide rates in China among factory workers. Look at the little "cities" they build where people work, eat and sleep in the same building complex, sharing bunk beds among the shift workers like a crew on a WWII submarine.

The Chinese have a large enough country and population that they could make enough things to sell to one another and become a truly prosperous country. They instead choose to keep most of their people poor and repressed, while a few get very wealthy selling cheap, already invented goods to the rest of the world. That's what you consider progress?

You are really a bit uninformed---companies that pull out here have pulled out of other countries when they find a cheaper one (like several that relocated to Mexico initially, then moved to Sri Lanka, for example). They aren't interested in helping third-world nations become solvent; their bottom line is profit. They are as bad as the Rockefellers and Carnegies with their company stores and such---whoops---it is still the Rockefellers!!

The very simple fact of the matter is that American corporations exploit China for cheap labor. The US Chamber of Commerce negotiates looser regulations (and more tightly restricted labor unions) with the Chinese government, leading to slave labor conditions over there, and no manufacturing here. If you want manufacturing to come back to the US, either apply pressure on corporations to end these practices and improve wages and conditions in China, or take a manufacturing job for 25 cents an hour -- one way or the other, the playing field will have to be leveled out between the US and China.

And I can't go without calling Walmart by name. If you want to know who's driving wages down and manufacturing out, look no further.